Blues & Roots

Big Walter Horton Blues Trail Marker, Horn Lake, Mississippi April 6 was the bluesman Walter Horton’s birthday. When I first read of him, his birth year was given as 1918, but now I see it listed...

The past month saw the passing of two bluesmen, 97-year-old Texan Big Walter Price on March 8, and Jerry McCain, the Gadsden, Alabama-based harmonica player, who died on March 28 at age...

Billy Childs presented a magnificent, heart warming concert of Laura Nyro’s music at Sanders Theater in Cambridge on January 22. The performance drew on Childs’s 2014 album, Map to the Treasure: Reimagining...

Jimmy Johnson Today is the great bluesman Jimmy Johnson’s 90th birthday. I last saw him just over a year ago in Chicago, where he was the musical highlight of the trip, and at 88, still equally...

I’ve just listened all the way through Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” for the first time. I’ll move on to the rest of his new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, this weekend....

Bob Dylan in 2014; photo by Paolo Brillo Congratulations to Bob Dylan as this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. When I heard the news this morning, I thought well of the Nobel Committee...

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans?  How about Donna’s on Monday nights?  On the few occasions when I made my way to New Orleans earlier in this 21st , I’d make a point to stay...

Bobby “Blue” Bland (Saw Us Through) 1930-2013 June 24, 2013 There he is, the great Bobby “Blue” Bland, soulful and swinging, brassy and blunt, singing one of his most-requested, “That’s...

Bobby “Blue” Bland (Will See You Through) Remember Radio Raheem?  He’s the boom-box toting antagonist in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing who’s continually blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight...

Remember Radio Raheem?  He’s the boom-box toting antagonist in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing who’s continually blasting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”  Raheem (Bill Nunn) manages...